NCCI Presents 2010 Leveraging Excellence Awards at 11th Annual Conference in San Francisco
- July 26, 2010
Representatives from Kuali, an innovative collaboration for building open-source administrative software for a community of universities, and MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service (VMS) received the 2010 Leveraging Excellence Award presented by the National Consortium for Continuous Improvement in Higher Education (NCCI), and sponsored by the Follett Higher Education Group on July 23 at NCCI’s 11th Annual Conference in San Francisco, CA.
Jennifer Foutty, Executive Director, and Brad Wheeler, Vice President for Information Technology and CIO, Indiana University, and Chairman of the Kuali Foundation Board of Directors, accepted the award on behalf of Kuali. Sherwin Greenblatt, Director, accepted the award on behalf of the MIT Venture Mentoring Service.
The award winners will be featured presenters Saturday, July 24, from 8:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. at the Conference at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco.
The Kuali Foundation is a growing community of universities, colleges, businesses, and other organizations that have partnered to build and sustain open-source administrative software for higher education, by higher education. Kuali software is designed to meet the needs of all sizes of institutions, from land-grant research universities to community colleges. Members of the Kuali Community share a common vision of open, modular, and distributed systems for their software requirements. Kuali software is released under the Educational Community License. The Kuali Projects are tied together by the Kuali Foundation, a non-profit organization that coordinates the efforts of partners, manages and protects the community's intellectual property, and handles common concerns among the Kuali Projects.
MIT’s VMS program harnesses the knowledge and experience of volunteer alumni and other business leaders to help prospective entrepreneurs in the university community bring their ideas and inventions to market. Entrepreneurs receive practical education through a hands-on, team mentoring process that builds a trusted long-term relationship. This experiential learning increases the innovation output of the institution through greater commercialization of ideas and university technologies.
MIT VMS services are offered without charge to MIT students, alumni, faculty and staff who are considering the possibility of starting a new company. Entrepreneurs often come to VMS at very early stages in their idea process—usually before there is a business plan, a strategy and revenue model, a team, or any funding. VMS doesn’t screen to pick winners; rather, VMS’s mission is to use any plausible idea as the focus for practical education on the venture creation process.
Pete Peters, Executive Director of Innovate VMS of St. Louis, said his program is a replicate of the MIT initiative. MIT shared all of its documentation and processes with Innovate VMS of St. Louis. The St. Louis program began with five ventures in 2007 and is now up to 82. It started with 18 mentors and now has 120 mentors. “We could not have done this without help from MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service,” Peters said. MIT has helped eleven institutions start VMS systems, sharing their model openly.
The Leveraging Excellence Award Judging Panel included: Chair Lee Todd, President, University of Kentucky; Ronald A. Crutcher, President, Wheaton College (Massachusetts); Susan Jurow, Senior Vice President, Professional Development and Communications, National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO); Mohammad H. Qayoumi, President, ÂãÁÄÖ±²¥, East Bay; and Reginald Robinson, President & CEO, Kansas Board of Regents.
Follett Higher Education Group (http://www.fheg.follett.com/) provides sponsorship support for the NCCI Leveraging Excellence Award. “We thank Follett for its strong support of this program. With the challenges facing higher education today, it’s more important than ever for NCCI to promote the dissemination of innovative and effective programs and this Award program does just that,” said NCCI President Margaret Harrington, Director of Organization Improvement Services at the University of Southern California.
NCCI represents a wide range of member institutions, with many individuals working in organizational development, quality assessment, planning, and institutional improvement. Its programs promote sharing best practices and supporting professional development of individual members. To learn more about NCCI and the Leveraging Excellence program, please visit www.ncci-cu.org.